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LOVING KINDNESS

i choose life everyday.
i do.
i am so Pro-life, as in: i love my life.
maybe not every single day. some days I wanna crawl into a ball and hide, and stay under the covers, but generally, mostly, pretty consistently, i am pro-life. i am all for everyone making their own decisions, their own choices for their own life. i don’t wanna make your decisions for you. i don’t wanna pick out your clothes or shoes for you. if you wanna wear pastel colors and look pasty, hey, that’s your problem. not mine.

let’s talk choices.

many, many…many years ago i had an abortion. truthfully, honestly, cross my heart – i actually had two abortions. two that i’ll talk about. share. and on both occasions i sat alone in a waiting room with other young women who had also made bad choices, bad boy choices. and because we had made bad boy choices we were sitting all alone waiting to terminate our unwanted pregnancies.

let me just, for a second, tell you what that feels like, sitting alone, waiting to be called, to be taken into a room where you’re surrounded by kind strangers, and filled with thoughts of great sadness.

great guilt.
great shame.

it all begins with wanting someone to love you. that boy over there. the cute one. you want him to notice you, love you, pay attention. good god, you’ll do anything for him. you want him to like you, to love you back. you drink, you smoke, you flirt, you tell him yes yes, please, yes… and then maybe you end up in the back of a car, or in the basement, or in his room, or in the locker room in the gym and you let him have you. take you. you give yourself away. you think if i give him this, he’ll want me, love me, want more of me. you don’t think protection, or safety or disease, or pregnancy. you only think “i want you to love me.” and then you don’t hear from him, he doesn’t call, ever. you sit, and wait, and he doesn’t call and then you miss your period, and feel sick and think it’s the flu, or a cold, or a stomach virus, and then you feel really sick and start to gain a bit of weight, and he doesn’t notice you, he ignores you, and then you go to your doctor, or some doctor with a friend because you can’t tell your folks, and the doctor does a blood test and some urine test and tells you that your pregnant and you’re 15. maybe 16. and the guy that you liked, wanted, loved doesn’t even care if you’re alive and god knows he’s not going to want you more because you didn’t care enough about yourself to protect yourself, use a condom, tell him “NO, you can not cum inside of me,” and you find yourself sitting in a clinic with people who are kind and loving and brush your hair our of your eyes and say, “you’ll be fine, you’ll be fine,” and you want to believe them, and then someone holds your hand and says count backwards from 100 and the next thing you know that same someone is standing over you with a glass of orange juice, lifting your head ever so slightly, and saying, ‘take a sip, a little sip.” and then you get dressed and you feel shame and guilt and empty and lonely and you wish that you liked yourself enough to not have let that boy – the one who doesn’t even know you exist, who doesn’t even say hello to you in the hallways, who doesn’t even look at you out of the corner of his eyes – into your heart and soul and body. and you feel dirty, empty and dirty.

and yes, those were my choices: both the bad boy that i wanted, and loved madly who didn’t love me back, not one iota, and the abortion. and that choice that i made, the abortion, that one, that one saved my life, and that boys life.

and then there’s another choice… there are girls out there who get pregnant and have babies at 14 and 15 and 16 and then a year, or two later, they are overwhelmed, and unprepared, and no longer with that boy, and SOME of those young girls, some, they kill their babies. their child. they murder their babies, because they can’t do it anymore, they can’t do it alone because they’re overwhelmed, and underwater, and life is a burden. life is a heavy, hard burden and they’re only 18 years old, and they end up in prison.

and all those lives … all those lives… are ruined, destroyed, no longer.

there a thousands upon thousands upon thousands of young girls in this country that get pregnant, have babies, and then they abandon them, or hurt them, or kill them.

what kind of choice is that?
where’s the pro-life in that?

my choice was tragic. it was tragic from the get go. i didn’t know at the age of 16 that I could love me, love myself and that would be okay. more than okay. more than enough. i didn’t know that.

but those choices: having a baby, killing a baby – those choices are horrific.

we must teach our girls and our boys to CHOOSE TO LOVE THEIR OWN LIFE.
period.

and that is what PRO-LIFE should be about, not this crap about overturning Roe V. Wade, or closing down abortion clinics.

i have an idea, how about:
CHOOSE YOUR OWN LIFE.
LOVE IT. LIVE IT. WEAR IT WELL.

I saw “Freakonomics” the movie a few weeks back on cable. One of the stories (among several) was about the great 1990’s crime drop. They analyzed it, and broke it down. And you know what they found as the only descriptor or reason for the sudden dip all over this land? Roe v. Wade – yes, Roe v. Wade.

And then they surmised, that all those unwanted children who usually grew up and led lives of crime, lives of angry rejection, and drug use and dysfunction just weren’t around to do all those things.

This sounds horrid, like some form of eugenics, but it’s not. It’s a reversal of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” where George Bailey gets to see (via Clarence’s genius) what his town of Bedford Falls would be like without him – Pottersville. And as much as I love Lionel Barrymore, I’d never want to live in his town, no one would.

Now everyone loves a squalling infant, but wait a few years and the people screaming, “life, Life Life,” will be screaming, “Jail Jail Jail.”

I must also disclose that I have had one girlfriend who became pregnant on my watch. And to tell the truth I had always thought I might be sterile. Yes, in the 70’s we all had many partners.

Diane, was someone I met while taking an EST course in the mid-eighties, and to be honest I knew our brief get together of six months would not last her fervent, naive advocacy for EST. She was, as she herself admitted, a true believer, and when I tuned out not to be, though I readily admitted that EST made a strong and profound point, Diane would not be my lifelong partner.

Late in the relationship were making love and Diane said to me, “You haven’t got anyone pregnant because you have no “intention.” Intention was a big EST word, and it was as though she had issued a challenge, she herself wished to fulfill.

Well that night, I guess (as she said, “You’re not aiming”) I aimed. And she told me a few weeks later that she was pregnant.

I shelved my plan to end the relationship, and when the time came we went to the doctor for her third, and my first abortion. In fact, for weeks we had become closer in anticipation, but in that office seeing her go in while I sat, I felt faint and nearly passed out at what she was about to go through, however necessary.

The feeling was awful, the setting antiseptic and no amount of comfort would do. I took her back to my apartment, and we took care of each other for the next few weeks. She needed it. I needed it – neither one of us the same.

An abortion is a procedure to end a pregnancy. It uses medicine or surgery to remove the embryo or fetus and placenta from the uterus. The procedure is done by a licensed health care professional. The decision to end a pregnancy is very personal. If you are thinking of having an abortion, most healthcare providers advise counseling.”^”‘

Wow that was unusual. I just wrote an really long comment but after
I clicked submit my comment didn’t appear. Grrrr…
well I’m not writing all that over again. Anyhow, just wanted to say fantastic blog!